Tech trends that may disturb business over the next year

2018 was a big year for innovation in tech and its going to be continued in 2019. Gartner predicts that in 2019 global IT spending will increase by more than 3 percent. What will shake business? Which technologies do the largest investors invest in? What trends are worth to watch?

The rise of Artificial Intelligence

In 2019, we can expect an increase presence of artificial intelligence technology and machine learning in various industries. Companies are successively implementing strategies where a significant part is based on AI. And if so far these were mainly plans without specific projects, now we can expect actual actions and implementations of AI-based solutions. The food industry will use AI to predict deadlines in warehouses and automatically organize timely deliveries, medicine will use AI to monitor patients’ condition and prevent unnecessary hospitalization, the financial industry – to analyze the economic situation and create forecasts.

Enthusiasm and plans step by step turn into a rational approach. Organizations that want to implement AI-based projects should be aware that they must have prepared facilities to properly manage data (acquisition, processing and data flow).

Air, water, earth, and digitally affected by autonomous reality

We can expect that part of the activities traditionally performed by people will be able to be performed by autonomous systems. The scale of this phenomenon is systematically growing. Autonomous cars, robots, drones, virtual agents certainly do not sound like science fiction anymore and are increasingly becoming part of our reality.

By 2021, 10% of new vehicles will have autonomous driving capabilities, compared with less than 1% in 2018

Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 , Gartner

What we can expect is that interaction with the environment will become more and more developed and natural and consequently – more often will appear in our lives.

Augment analysis

The AI, Machine Learning engine is data. The analysis amounts of data needed to use AI/Machine Learning technologies effectively cannot be processed by a human being.

By 2020, more than 40% of data science tasks will be automated

Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 , Gartner

Analysis using machine learning and subsequent translation of results into NLP (natural language processing) is a fuel without which artificial intelligence will not be able to develop. In addition to performance, the second unquestionable advantage of this technology is the fact that algorithms are able to detect a large number of patterns, many more than is possible with human analysis.

The areas which are intensively developed are chatbots and other automatic types of communication with clients. Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to talk with Monika Kowalska or another automated assistant knows how much has already been achieved in the topic, but also how much can still be improved – the goal here is the most natural way of reflecting of human reaction and achieving full effectiveness.

Blockchain – from fascination to mature and effective implementation

Keeping in mind that blockchain is not only the cryptocurrency, in 2019 we can expect mature and well thought-out implementations of this technology. Estonia can be an example of a proactive approach in this matter. The critical components of the “data embassy” (the Estonian project for digitizing the critical data stored by public administration) are based on the blockchain technology.

Infrastructure management

A critical factor affecting the increase of efficiency and productivity of activities is jointly between individual elements of system architecture and appropriate management. An appropriately constructed data architecture will allow to collect, transfer and store data, which will then be processed and used to increase the current efficiency and generate new sources of income.

Quantum computing

New technologies force us to face the amount of information that often exceeds processors capabilities. It is expected that in the future the analysis of big amounts of data will be taken over by qubits-based quantum computers. Gartner illustrated this by comparing the actions of quantum computers to reading book in a huge library. A computer based on a binary system works by reading each book individually. A computer based on qubits reads them all at once.

By 2023, 20% of organizations will be budgeting for quantum computing projects, compared to less than 1% in 2018

Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 , Gartner

Today, quantum processing is only 1%, but the specifics of quantum processing will make their use more common.

Ethics and security issues

All these ways technology will force the environment to answer ethical questions. The autonomous cars accidents, the responsibility for forecasts burdened with errors are just obvious examples of what problems we will face in the future. The second important issue on which reality will force us to pay attention is security. In an ideal scenario artificial intelligence helps us in everyday life, we can expect that criminals will also use it to carry out attacks. The types and amounts of attacks will be defined by the creativity of hackers. Therefore, security issues must be equally explored in parallel with the development paths of the technologies.

What you can be sure of i – the technological evolution will require that companies that do not want to stay behind will have to specify a development strategy that takes into account the upcoming trends. The fact that 60% of organizations during strategy implementation are using external help – outsourcing or partnership – the key to choose the right partner who had knowledge and experience and can be an effective support.